Red Hat plants flag in OpenStack for hybrid future

OpenStack Summit Red Hat made a major play for enterprise hearts and minds at the OpenStack Summit this week with a slew of announcements including an update to its cloud management platform, OpenForms, and the beta launch of the hybrid cloud-supporting RHEL OpenStack Platform 4.0.

CloudForms 3.0, which runs as a virtual appliance, is Red Hat’s tool allowing users to self provision from a single pane of glass, as well as assess capacity, enforce quotas, generate usage reports and do post-provisioning.

Hybrid cloud has been one of the key themes of the summit so far, and so it is that CloudForms 3.0 offers greater support for firms managing workloads on AWS.

These include the ability to track and alert admins about AWS workload performance and usage; to provision Amazon Machine Instances according to policy and to establish private networks within AWS thanks to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud support.

It also features integration with Amazon Identity and Access Management for greater security and control.

In beta at present, the new offering features support for physical/virtual server lifecycle management tool Foreman; as well as OpenStack’s orchestration (Heat), networking (Neutron) and cloud metering (Ceilometer) elements plus Red Hat Storage Server 2.1.

As if that weren’t enough to tempt enterprise users, the scarlet fedora also announced its PaaS offering OpenShift is now available for deployment on OpenStack via the Heat orchestration program. The company also previewed OpenStack-M, an OpenStack deployment/management tool based on Tuskar.

Interestingly, there was no mention of the announcements or any demos at the Red Hat keynote at the summit on Wednesday – in fact most of the vendors here have been strangely reticent in promoting their latest wares on stage.

However, consulting engineer Mark McLoughlin did speak passionately about the TripleO deployment program as the “next big leap” for OpenStack, adding that as the open source project continues to expand it will need to “evolve its culture, governance and processes”.

On the other side of the OpenStack table, Canonical has been trying its hardest to cement its position as a leading member of the open source project.

As well as announcing two new PaaS projects with Pivotal, the firm launched the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) – a new effort to help its channel partners build Ubuntu-on-OpenStack products by offering testing and validation of hardware and software interoperability.

Cisco, Dell, IBM and others have already signed up, according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth. ®